Words That Don't Translate
訳せない言葉
In her language there was a word for the of missing a place you can never return to.
What that single word held, three English sentences could only gesture toward.
She wished there were an English word for the smell of rain on her childhood street.
What she felt at had a name at home, but here it stayed nameless and heavy.
At the language school, the teacher asked the class to translate a simple family word.
What came out of Amara's mouth was correct, yet it carried none of the warmth she meant.
She wished her classmates could feel what the original word did to her chest.
Some feelings, she realised, are shaped by the language that first gave them a home.
What cannot be translated is often what matters most, hidden in the gaps between tongues.
She began to keep a small notebook of words that no dictionary would ever hold.
Beside each one she wrote, in the new language, the closest and always failing guess.
What her mother called the evening light had no equal here, only pale approximations.
She wished she could hand these words to her new friends like small warm stones.
But language is not a bag of stones; it is the shape of a whole life.
What she was losing, word by word, was not but a way of feeling the world.
Each untranslatable term was a tiny room in a house only she could still enter.
She wished, sometimes, that feeling and speaking could be pulled cleanly apart.
Yet the two had grown together in her since before she could remember either.
What the new language gave her was , while the old one had given her .
She did not want to choose between reaching wide and reaching down into herself.
Perhaps a person could hold two languages the way one holds two hands.
What mattered was not translating each feeling but living inside both.
She closed the notebook, knowing it would never be finished, and that was right.
Some words are meant to stay untranslated, guarding the country they came from.
She would carry them quietly, like seeds, in case a for them appeared.
What could not cross the border in words would cross, instead, inside her.